Every South African fielder has had a role model to look up to: Jonty Rhodes, Peter Kirsten and Sybrand Engelbrecht explain why the country has never lacked fielding talent Telford Vice
April 5, 2010

When AB de Villiers soared into the Bangalore night to snuff out Praveen Kumar's innings for the Royal Challengers 10 days ago, he wasn't only making a seemingly impossible catch spectacularly possible. He was also continuing a tradition of South Africans daring to go where no other fielders, except those from Australia, have regularly gone before.
By any standard, de Villiers' effort shimmered with brilliance. Praveen pulled lustily at the first ball he faced, a short delivery from the Delhi Daredevils' Umesh Yadav, and sent it arcing towards the long-off boundary. De Villiers scrambled backward and launched his leap with perfect timing. He snared the wannabe six high above his head in his right hand and hung onto the ball as he crashed to earth a foot inside the rope.
"Awesome," was Jonty Rhodes' description of de Villiers' catch, and he should know. From 1992 to 2003, Rhodes dazzled opponents and delighted crowds with the kind of catching and fielding that would have won him star billing in PT Barnum's Big Top. Rhodes was the epitome of the gritty middle-order batsman, and a more treasured team man will never exist. But he will forever be remembered for diving headlong into the stumps to run out Inzamam-ul-Haq at the 1992 World Cup.
Click on the first mention of Rhodes' name in this story, and you will be taken to a profile page illustrated not with a photograph of him playing a fine stroke, but of him flying through the air with the greatest of ease to take another of those impossible catches.
This thread can be traced back more than 50 years, at least, in South Africa's cricket history. Before Rhodes, Peter Kirsten was South Africa's angel of death in the field. Before Kirsten, Colin Bland, "the Golden Eagle", preyed on hapless batsmen.
"Youngsters tend to look up to their cricketing idols, and in my case that was Colin Bland," Kirsten said. "Hopefully that means that Jonty was watching me!" Indeed, he was. "Peter Kirsten was my hero," Rhodes said, unprompted.
The modern mantle might just belong to Sybrand Engelbrecht, a 21-year-old blond ghost who haunted backward point with enthusiasm as memorable as his athleticism at the 2008 Under-19 World Cup. He took five catches, some of them positively Rhodesian, in the three matches he played, and added to his value by hurrying and harrying batsmen into and out of singles. If the ball was being hit somewhere he wasn't, he was in the captain's ear, nagging to be moved to the hot spot.
And Engelbrecht's hero? "Without a doubt, definitely Jonty. He's been my role model," he said.
But, according to Rhodes, South Africa's fielding prowess is more than the preserve of a few shining individuals. "We were untested as an international team when we went to the 1992 World Cup," Rhodes said. "But [former South Africa captain] Kepler [Wessels] told us there were two areas in which we could dominate: fitness and fielding.
"We had Fanie de Villiers out on the boundary and Brian McMillan and Kepler in the slips. They were all excellent fielders. Fielding was something we could compete at even without international experience." Eighteen years of international experience later that remains true: "You can judge a good fielding side by the fact that they don't have to hide anyone. That's the case with South Africa." Rhodes thinks the reason for that goes down to grassroots level, and he says he has the evidence to back up his claim. "Our fields are just so good and so well-maintained. I wish I could show you the video clip of my son playing in his first outdoor cricket match. There he was, diving and sliding all over the place. And he was five years old!
"Fields in Australia are pretty much the same as they are in South Africa, and I think it's fair to say that those two countries have been at the forefront of fielding over the years."
In other countries, cricket and cricketers could be considered less fortunate. For instance, in India, where Rhodes is part of the Mumbai Indians' coaching staff in the IPL. "You just don't get much grass in this part of the world. I was talking to Mark Boucher and he said he can feel the strain on his knees even through his wicketkeeping pads. That's an indication of how hard the fields are here." For Engelbrecht, practice makes perfect. "Fielding is about hard work and confidence, and catching hundreds of balls in training," he said. "People look at someone like Richard Branson and how he makes building a business empire look so easy. What they don't see is how much time and effort he has put in behind the scenes to make it look so easy."
Rhodes and Engelbrecht belong to a generation of cricketers who don't need to be convinced of the advantages to be had from superior conditioning and a more intense focus on skills training. Not so Kirsten, who began to make his way in the game when cricket was still something of an amateur pursuit in South Africa. However, early in his career he encountered the forward-thinking Eddie Barlow, who was among the earliest believers in fitness and better training methods for cricketers.

"You can judge a good fielding side by the fact that they don't have to hide anyone. That's the case with South Africa" Jonty Rhodes

Kirsten also suffered a serious knee injury that required long, lonely hours of rehabilitation. "I used to train hard individually in the 70s and 80s. That made the difference for me," Kirsten said.
"South Africans are naturally athletic people, and since the 90s fitness levels have improved. These days there is also plenty of sports science around for us to make use of."
But certain aspects of fielding would seem to remain in the realm of instinct. "Anticipation is very important, as is peripheral vision," Kirsten said. "It's vital to be able to read the batsman. I suppose there are some things you just can't coach." Kirsten held more than his share of unforgettable catches, but his trademark as a fielder was the fluid pick-up-and-throw from the covers that cut down many batsmen short of their ground. He was mercury in motion, and just as deadly. Who knows how many run-outs he would have effected had his career fallen more squarely into the age of electronic umpiring?
Bland bestrode the covers from the 1950s to the 70s, a lean, grim reaper. He threw down the stumps almost at will, his reward for endless hours spent in solitary practice sessions, and intimidated batsmen with his sheer presence. "He was brilliant in certain positions," remembered Trevor Goddard, Bland's captain in 12 of the 21 Tests he played in the 1960s. "We also fielded him at mid-on a lot of the time, and he was so accurate when throwing at the stumps. When he was patrolling the boundary, he would send these underarm throws whistling in. The batsmen wouldn't dare take two to him."
Goddard recalled the bleak observation made by former England captain Peter May after a 1956-57 rubber in which he was caught seven times in 10 innings and recorded his lowest Test series average, 15.30. "He said that if you hit the ball in the air when you were playing against South Africa, you should expect to be caught."
Praveen Kumar won't argue with that.

Table tennis will never know what it let slip. Had Wasim Akram pursued the sport he was truly mad for in his youth, who knows what kind of legacy he would have kickstarted in a country where table tennis is fanatically played, albeit mostly in amateur environs. Fortunately the wrists were put to other use.
Akram was foremost a triumph for imagination. No bowler in the modern age - Shane Warne aside - so broadened the scope and possibility of what could be done in his art as much as Akram. To be sure there were no nincompoops in fast bowling before him, but had not some staleness and uni-dimensionality crept in?
In the decade preceding Akram's arrival, fast bowling, led by the Caribbean, had become a pursuit of violence, a tool of intimidation. Lengths were short and unrelenting; throats and heads were the target. Sure there were Marshalls, Hadlees or Imrans who operated differently, but even they had been poster boys for bouncer wars, and only circumstances had necessitated they evolved beyond those. The age wasn't brainless, just brutal and repetitive.
To Akram these things also mattered; the speed, the roughing up, the macho point-proving. But the greatest urge in him was to explore what a cricket ball can do. So his lengths were always fuller. So he took what could be done with the old ball, hitherto territory charted by two predecessors, to new worlds altogether. To left-arm fast bowling - an anomaly till then - he gave a face and new dimensions, with new angles and attack lines. To dead pitches he gave life. Even deader ones, he simply bypassed. In his hand, a yorker became as dangerous as a bouncer. And in his time, the last 10 overs of an ODI innings became a momentum shift for the fielding side.
West Indian quicks were frightening but Akram was frightening in his range. When he won out against Patrick Patterson in 1989 to become Lancashire's sole overseas player, the triumph seemed loaded with bigger signs if you wanted to look for them.
It didn't all just come to him. He had a bit about him, admittedly, even when he debuted, a gawky whirl of mulleted-bouffant hair, a wormy moustache and angular run-up. (So coltish was he that when picked for his first tour he asked Javed Miandad how much money he should take, not knowing he would be paid to play). As great a bowler as he was to become, he was in equal parts a greater worker and learner.

One remarkable delivery to Rahul Dravid in Chennai, did several things at once. So cruel and wicked was it, on its way to clipping off-bail, the edge of Dravid's bat must have heard a cackle, a subcontinental mother-in-law to her daughter-in-law, "Hah, you thought you had me covered?"

Imran, who believed Akram to be the most naturally gifted cricketer he had seen, was instrumental in developing both traits. On a seminal tour of England in 1987, Imran drove Akram around in his own car, telling him, among many things, "You have to work like a dog, Wasim." The advice became a career commandment, and for all the gawping at his ability, little was made about the many hours Akram spent in nets, the gym or training, his capacity, as Fred Trueman might have piped, to work bloody hard. To this day Akram, diabetic now, maintains a rigorous fitness regime.
And he picked up swiftly. Most of what he needed came from Imran. Standing at mid-on, like a kind but distant uncle, Imran was Mr Miyagi to Akram's Daniel, planning out overs, suggesting ideas and fields. After a couple of early last-over spankings by Jeremy Coney and Ashantha de Mel, mentor told pupil to learn bowling yorkers at will. Out went pupil under mentor's eye, bowling at one stump, aiming at the top of it, and hit the base four times in three overs. In the next ODI he picked up four, with three - including de Mel - yorked. In every net session thereafter, this routine was maintained. Malcolm Marshall's brain was picked, once when the inswinger wasn't working. Sir Richard Hadlee was often mined. From watching Franklyn Stephenson, Akram developed the slower ball. Even when, in the mid-90s, he began relying mostly on the old ball, he forced himself back to nets and county cricket to re-learn how to bowl the new ball.
Essentially, though he kept refining, adding and revisiting, by the early 90s he was as complete as anyone and more imaginative. Waqar Younis, opening partner, best friend, vice-captain, foe and rival, was a bomb waiting to go off; Akram, merely a sword slicing his way through with care and poise.
The run-up seemed random - especially when he was bowling no-ball after no-ball - but it was apparently measured to 17 paces. The action was over before you even sussed it, all wrist and shoulder, back foot pointing back at delivery: it was to tell on his groin, that strange position in his early years. He could bowl anything and everything; Mark Taylor observed, in his prodigious days, that Akram could land four balls on the same spot in an over and do four different things with it. The holy grail of left-arm bowling - bringing it in to the right-hander - was his from the start. He could cut it in, out, over and round the wicket, swing it early, late, change pace, length; every kind of ball imaginable he had.

Some were beyond imagination. One remarkable delivery to Rahul Dravid in Chennai, did several things at once. So cruel and wicked was it, on its way to clipping the off bail, the edge of Dravid's bat must have heard a cackle, a subcontinental mother-in-law to her daughter-in-law, "Hah, you thought you had me covered?" Robert Croft survived such magic once, only because no one realised that Akram had made an in-ducking yorker from round the wicket curve so much so late that it went past Croft's outside edge to hit him in front of middle.
Despite his new-ageism, Akram could be old school. Sachin Tendulkar was rapped on the helmet once in Sharjah, with a ball that leapt up as unexpectedly - and gracefully - as a dolphin from the sea. And one of the "quickest, meanest spells" Steve Waugh ever faced - the sample is big - was Akram's second day post-lunch, short-ball battering of Waugh's body and mind in Rawalpindi, which is to fast bowling what the nuclear bomb is to humanity. Some days, Akram could be the nastiest bit of work; it is precisely the point that it was at his choosing.
The golden seal was in his nose for the occasion: The bigger the game, the bigger the game-changer was Akram. This cannot be priced, nor can it be taught. The fortunate can only channel it to become uber-beings on such days.
Hark back to the eyes when Allan Lamb and Chris Lewis were felled that night in Melbourne: they knew what was happening, but maybe not how it was done. Or the rare fist-pumping and self-geeing up in his 18-ball 33: this was Akram but an Akram detached, when for him cricket became, like table tennis, an individual pursuit.
This state descended upon him often. Normally he would listen to Imran but in the Nehru Cup final, having been ordered to chill and take a single when he came in with Pakistan needing three off two, he swung for six to win it. In Melbourne, incidentally, he had asked Imran to put him back on against Lamb. Lancashire buddy Neil Fairbrother never saw Akram as charged as in his first Lord's final, the 1990 B&H. Who knows what kind of scars he inflicted on Graeme Hick that day, collateral damage among three wickets and a quick momentum-shifting hand.
His batting wasn't rigorous enough, and it never fully rid itself of the instincts of street or village green. But tellingly, pressure brought out ability far greater than was usually apparent. His first Test hundred was, after all, in Australia, where the good and great of Pakistan batting have gone to be exposed. That Pakistan were effectively 6 for 5 when he walked in was only by the by.

The bigger the game, the bigger the game-changer was Akram. This cannot be priced, nor can it be taught

Probably his finest Test innings, to these eyes, was the unbeaten 45 to sneak Pakistan home at Lord's. Chasing 138, he came in at 62 for 5, to become 95 for 8 before long. Every ball carried the danger of an Akram implosion, a mis-swept mow to midwicket, a swished edge, yet each ball revealed unseen good sense and even technique. Somehow he held it together for two hours, before the shot that made him look most like a proper batsman, the cover drive that won the Test. Beautiful he looked in white, nearly on one knee, the parrot green helmet of the World Cup final controlling his mop and confirming unintentionally that he was a genius across formats.
So, so much else; the Australasia Cup final hat-trick and 49; three wickets in the second Carlton & United final; two wickets in the first over against India of a Sharjah final; four international hat-tricks - and I can't remember anyone who was on a hat-trick more often; four wickets in five balls in a Test, which should have been five had Imran not dropped a sitter to prevent another hat-trick. Had Andrew Flintoff actually even half a collection of bending occasions to his will - to use a tiresome English qualification - he would have replaced the Queen and been leader of the free world already.
Only leadership came to him slowly. His first stint was disaster, as all Pakistan's experiments with young captains are. Having been a rebel, he found himself rebelled against. Imran's strong ways were there, but not his maturity, worldliness or performance initially. Marriage to a psychotherapist helped him grow though, so that in his later stints he was a good leader in deed and example. Potentially difficult tours to England, in 1996, and India, in 1998-99, were handled with boundless goodwill, considerable dignity and pride, all difficult to mesh, more so in those environments.
Nineteen ninety-nine was the year in which he was most leader-like, no tactical master, but a man able to command respect and unity on performance alone. In the great Pakistan tradition of arch contradiction, however, he lay sullied just a year later with the publication of the Qayyum report. That mess stripped away a lot, foremost his credibility and reputation. Maybe a career in coaching too, which, going by his record as a roaming freelance guru to left-armers, he could have been good at.
But it never stripped away the beauty Akram brought while leaving fast bowling unrecognisable from what it was before him. A triumph for imagination and he did it without a wand, cape or top hat.

It is not too difficult to see why, if Sanath Jayasuriya had not been a cricketer, he would have been an accomplished fencer, sallying forth towards his opponent, as he does when he dances down the wicket, with nimbleness of foot and alertness of eye. You can visualise the epee twirling dexterously in his quick hands and sense the swordsman`s acceptance of having his life hang by a string. The qualities of skill and daring form a rare combination, perhaps suited more to a gambler than a top order batsman and yet, to see Jayasuriya bat is to see a finely crafted gambler at work, sensing an opportunity and thriving on it.

Over the last 16 months, Jayasuriya has made the leap that so many cricketers aspire to but rarely can; from being an exciting scene-stealer to playing the lead role. You could sense something was going to happen when he walked out but you could be sure there would be just a few flashes of lightning. The promise of a storm without the dense cloud to back it.

Though he was talked about as a one-day specialist then, he only had a batting average of about 13 and certainly didnt have enough wickets to justify his presence as a bowler even though he held the best bowling figures by a Sri Lankan in one-day cricket. It was tempting to label Jayasuriya as someone who could neither bat nor bowl well enough. Or at any rate, consistently enough.
Unlike men of destiny who make their future, Jayasuriya seemed to wait for fortune to stop by. As any sportsman will tell you, it only happens rarely, and crucial years of youth passed by, taking away opportunity and a fair chunk of hair. Then suddenly, the wheel of fortune stopped alongside him. At Bloemfontein, the heart of rightwing Afrikaner territory, Jayasuriya first rode the crest of a new revolution. Opening the batting against New Zealand, he scored 140, his first limited overs century. It also made him the record-holder for the highest individual score in one-day internationals by a Sri Lankan and while that didn't make him a great batsman overnight, it meant that he was up above such outstanding talents as Roy Dias and Aravinda de Silva. A wanderer in search of home had found it; at the top of the order.

In the next few months, Jayasuriya waded into opposition attacks not with the fluency of the swordsman but with the bluntness of a battle tank. The guns boomed for a while but he was also an easy target and the opposition waited for him to shoot himself. In- variably he did. Until the tour of Australia late last year. On the bouncy tracks that had exposed so many before him. Jayasuriya discovered that he loved the ball coming onto him. Better still, he relished the challenge of aggressive cricketers and hostile officials and his century in the last Test at Perth was a wonder- ful innings studded with bold shots and marked by a refreshing absence of orthodoxy.

Too often, batsmen tend to be predictable, playing a ball as the manual suggests. Bowlers don`t mind bowling to such batsmen be- cause they can work out the best way to attack them. But here was a batsman who believed strokes were meant to be played even in the Test match theatre and who was just as much at home driving through cover on the rise as he was pulling in front of square. He had begun to like fast bowlers and they had started discovering a distaste for him. Subtly, quite unlike the manner in which he plays his cricket, the balance was tilting.

And then came the World Cup. And Delhi. Jayasuriya made 79 from 76 balls, a pedestrian pace by recent standards but his partner- ship with Kaluwitharna had redefined the way the early overs would be played in one-day cricket. Ironically, their batting averages only added up to around 35, the figure you would want a good top order batsman to have.

With batting records falling like rain in a Bombay monsoon, Jayasuriya took on England, a side whose defeats bring a totally inexplicable but perverse joy to most cricket-playing countries. His 82 from 43 balls brought him instant international attention for he was now playing innings that were long enough to win matches on their own. And then came the crucial spell in Calcutta that destroyed India and showed up the Eden Gardens as just another fair weather crowd. That was one of the outstanding bowling performances of the tournament because he bowled the perfect line on a helpful wicket: the sign of a shrewd, think- ing crick- eter.

The World Cup made him a star but there were many including me, who remained a bit sceptical of the Player of the Tournament award. Did he have the substance, one wondered, to win it ahead of Tendulkar or Waugh ? Did he have the statesmanship to play the kind of innings Mark Waugh played at Madras: surely one of the great innings of limited overs cricket ? Did he evoke the same awe as those two ?

If the end of the World Cup, a stunning success for him, still evoked an uncertain response, the picturesque Padang in Singapore provided convincing proof. A century from 48 balls against one of the best attacks in the world had to be something special, irrespective of the length of the boundary. The world record had gone by 14 balls; a bit like a young upstart coming up and doing seven metres against Sergei Bubka.

Jayasuriya is now writing a new chapter in the short history of the one-day game because he is perfecting a style that is radi- cally different from anything that has come before; a lot more revolutionary than Martin Crowe`s use of Dipak Patel with the new ball in the 1992 World Cup. There is now a new grammar to cricket for underneath this carnage lies a definite pattern.

Even as the fastest 50 appears in the record books what is most awesome is not the power behind the shots but the sense of predictability around the obvious danger of his approach. That is because he picks his spot to hit, sees the ball very early and has the divine ability to find spaces rather than fielders.

As he drives his Audi down past Galle on the road to Matara, Jayasuriya will be aware, being a shrewd cricketer, that cricket- ing brains around the world will be working on how to stop him. At 26, that is a great reputation to have.

If I was Jayasuriya, I`d turn the music on and watch the beautiful palms of Sri Lanka.
Source :: Daily News (http.//www.lanka.net)

Bangladesh had few problems in disposing of Scotland for the second time in three days, but another crushing defeat at Dhaka - the margin was 146 runs - left the Scots with some major headaches as the World Cup looms. Once again, Scotland's batting let them down, and while several players got starts, none were able to go on and make a more substantial contribution. In the two games of this brief series eight batsmen passed 20 and yet none scored more than 30. With the exception of Zimbabwe, Bangladesh are the weakest of the Full Member countries, but the ease with which they brushed aside the Scots only underlined that the gulf between the top sides and the Associates remains a wide as ever.
Bangladesh did what they needed to do well. With the exception of Mushfiqur Rahim, their top eight all made decent contributions, but it was the unbeaten seventh-wicket stand of 79 between Mashrafe Mortaza and Mohammad Ashraful which sunk Scotland who until then had kept things pretty much under wraps. Mortaza bludgeoned 51 not out from 28 balls, an onslaught which included five sixes.
Scotland needed a good start; instead, they lost Navdeep Poonia - his second duck on the trot - and Dougie Brown in Mortaza's first over and from 0 for 2 there was no way back. There was a recovery of sorts, but as was the case on Friday, Scotland's middle order offered nothing and Abdur Razzak benefited with four wickets.
And it was a wretched match for Craig Wright, their captain, who was making a record 154th appearance in Scotland colours. Not only did his side slide to defeat but he also made a three-ball duck. "We came here to be competitive," he said, "but unfortunately we could not."
Some resistance late on enabled Scotland to post three figures, but that cannot hide the fact that their batting is too brittle. As for Bangladesh, their eighth successive one-day victory can only further boost the suspicion that there is real room for optimism in 2007.

He is considered a cheat, a seller of his soul and his team. Was an Armani-suited sourpuss who let down Sachin Tendulkar when the young tyro was captain. Let his filmstar wife run his life. Had the communication skills of a Benedictine monk. And once outdid himself in Sharjah by holding a press conference during which he sat with his foot on the table, clipping his toenails.
This is my favourite cricketer! Perhaps some explanation is due.
Much of what is said about Mohammad Azharuddin is true and a lot is not. But where myth met reality was hard to say, for he was hardly willing, or able it seemed, to bare his soul. For a so-called "simple" fellow, a defining term in his young days, he would become the most complex of cricketing creatures.
As a young apprentice, it is said, he was reticent, private, locked in a cocoon of shyness, fumbling across a big stage. Only with a bat was he articulate, but even there he was not so much given to prose as to poetry. His beginning was all fairytale: the unknown young Hyderabadi, slim and tall and all whippy strokes, dancing to three centuries in his first three Tests, capturing a national imagination, and unwittingly thrusting himself into a world he comprehended little.
A life in Indian cricket is much harder to negotiate than we think. "Small-town boy comes good" makes for a great story, but an arduous journey. Boys from nowhere are suddenly front-page news, invited to a baffling celebrity world, being asked to perform not just on the field but everywhere, every day, and this transition from riding cycles to practice to being owner of a chauffeured Mercedes, all done in the public eye, all so terribly fast, is seductive and scary.
There is no one in officialdom to help, no one to show the way or explain this new world; it is stand or fall. India should have learned from Azhar's mistakes, from Vinod Kambli's, but still, even now, players are left to their own devices.
Family is vital. Friends who are there not merely to massage the ego but brave enough to point out flaws are valuable. What Azhar's experience was, is hard to say, but perhaps in his later years he lacked direction, for he lost, or seemed to lose, his way. Why, we didn't, and do not, know.
Terse, often rude (yet ironically admired by teams from other shores, for mostly he was a gentleman on the field), scuffling with photographers, his divorce on the front page ("Cricketer leaves wife for actress," as if this was some unholy sin), he became easy to dislike and we took, most of us, that easy way. In his later years, he did not fit the story we wanted him to be. Barring Harsha Bhogle's book on him, there is scarcely a piece that revealed him to us.
For me, it made him as much repelling as compelling, frustrating but fascinating, this artless yet artful man of silken strokes and stony face. Later, Bhogle would tell stories of how Azhar would slip a personal cheque to players during benefit matches, and it made you rethink, wonder that perhaps there were elements to this clumsy, confounding man that we did not know, or care to.

Much of what is said about Mohammad Azharuddin is true and a lot is not. But where myth met reality was hard to say, for he was hardly willing, or able it seemed, to bare his soul

He was my favourite because no sportsman ever made me struggle so much, no Indian athlete demanded so much inner debate, no cricketer so confused the senses. As a writer you'd compose a paragraph, delete it, try again, delete, unable to suitably capture his character, explain his motivations.
We had a fair idea about Tendulkar, we could explain the once inscrutable Javagal Srinath, we could even comprehend the complex Sourav Ganguly, but Azhar defied glib definition. He challenged the imagination, he forced us to confront our biases (few liked him later on, so criticism was rarely questioned), he tested our intuitiveness, he tried our capabilities as journalists, he made us, all flawed men ourselves, understand the nature of compassion and imperfection.
He was my favourite also because he played like from a boy's dream, with an unhurried, wristy, impossibly careless, intoxicating grace (well, when the bowling wasn't quick and short), his bat a blade and he a fencer of arcs and angles and cuts and thrusts, not so much tearing apart attacks as slicing them open, standing there as upright and elegant and arrogant as a bullfighter, and even when, incomprehensibly, he whimsically wanted to score off each shot, turning into some passing whirlwind of shot-making, his play could never be called violent, as if such a word was too commonplace to attach itself to such a cultured cricketer. In short, he made you write sentences like this, one collective, bewildered exhale. He was not so much great as he was beautiful.
My last long interview with him was when he'd helped take India past Mark Taylor's Australians in 1998. In Bangalore, in his hotel room, the incongruity of the man was once again evident. The prayer mat next to the designer suits; the six pairs of designer sunglasses next to the amulet. The small-town boy who was never allowed to watch films, now married to an actress; the private man caught in the most public of careers. If it was confusing for us, imagine what it was for him.
There is no excuse for him, there cannot be; and he carries alone the responsibility for his sins. But even now, in his disgrace, he returns like an old, familiar ghost to haunt me. A man who did himself no justice. And in some strange way, perhaps, possibly, neither did we.

It's incredible how 600 Test wickets has become a routine milestone. That Anil Kumble would get there had been apparent for a year, that he would get there so quickly in this series was perhaps not expected. When he got to 400 wickets in 2004, he had said it would be nice to get to 500. At the rate he has been going it is conceivable he joins his illustrious comrades and rivals, Shane Warne and Muthiah Muralitharan, in the 700-club.
It would be fitting, too, because Kumble belongs in their company. In their contrasting and incomparable ways these three kept the flag flying for spin bowling, that most delicate and noble of cricket arts, in an era when everything - bigger bats, shorter boundaries and the limitations of one-day cricket - conspired against slow bowlers. It is staggering that between them the holy trinity have teased, deceived and winkled out over 2000 victims. And if Murali and Kumble keep going the number could well swell to 2500. That, you can safely say, would take some beating.
Kumble has certainly been hurrying to his landmarks. The last 200 wickets have come in 40 Tests, and the only thing that would stop him, it seems, is a weakening shoulder that has speared down more 38,000 balls in 18 years and has already been under the scalpel. I chatted with one of his colleagues before this series and to him it was never a matter of faltering form or a waning of desire. It was only a matter of how many overs Kumble could squeeze out of that shoulder.
That he has been an unusual spinner has been said many times before. It has also been said, a trifle unfairly, that he is a unidimensional bowler. Palpably, he has lacked the turn of Warne and Murali, but his variety has been subtler, far more apparent to batsmen than to viewers. He has shown that not only turn and flight that can deceive the batsman but also the changes of length and pace. He has been a cultured practitioner of his unique craft and a master of nuances. How many times have batsmen gone forward to find the ball not quite there, or gone back to find it hurrying on to them? It's only in the later years of his career that umpires over the world have started declaring batsmen lbw on the front foot. Had they been more amenable to one of Kumble's most natural modes of dismissal, he may even have had a hundred more wickets by now.
He would perhaps have a few more if he didn't have to provide succour to his bowling colleagues who, for a substantial period of his career, couldn't soften up the top order as Glenn McGrath did for Warne. And with India's batting proving fragile overseas for the first 12 years of his career, he has often been pressed into damage control rather than hunting for wickets.
Only in the last five years has he had the cushion of runs and the comfort of a pace bowling attack with some teeth. It has allowed Kumble the luxury of being more expressive and experimental. He has expanded his range, looked to bowl more googlies, slow the pace down, toss the ball up bit more and take more risks than he could afford in the earlier years. The results are revealing.
His first 84 Tests yielded him 397 wickets at a strike rate of 67.1 and an economy rate of 2.52 runs an over. He has been far more generous to batsmen in the last 40 Tests, allowing them 3.04 runs an over, but the strike-rate has dipped by nearly ten points to 58.5, almost at par with Shane Warne's career-rate. His career strike-rate of over 64 is the highest among the top ten wicket-takers of all time but it must be viewed in the context of his predicament.
It was fitting in many ways that he got to his latest landmark against Australia, for he has always stood tall against these mighty opponents, claiming 105 of their wickets, 68 of which have come in the last 10 Tests. He was lion-hearted on his last tour here, claiming 24 wickets in three Tests after being ignored for the first, but he returned with the regret of not being able close out the series for India on the last day of the Sydney Test. The wicketkeeper wasn't his greatest ally that day, nor were the umpires.
Given the task of leading the county in the autumn of his career, Kumble has brought the same dignity and competitiveness that have distinguished him as a player. It was a job that should have been his by right - John Wright, India's coach for four years, often used to reflect on what India had lost by not choosing him as captain - but was ultimately granted by default. In some ways, that has been the story of Kumble's life: he has had persevere till recognition and reward could be denied no longer.
Six hundred Tests wickets were inevitable, but let this be another reason to celebrate the success of one of the greatest cricketers India has produced, and a man who has dignified his sport.

When he was playing, Allan Border was never my favourite cricketer. I couldn't see past the glittering surfaces of Dennis Lillee, Doug Walters, and Ian Chappell; then Vivian Richards, Clive Lloyd and Michael Holding. Experience didn't add depth to my vision. In recent years my favourites have been dashers like Adam Gilchrist, princes of the willow like VVS Laxman, or fearsome athletes like Curtly Ambrose.
But just recently I went back to look at the Australian "Team of the Century", voted in 2000. Every player in the XI was part of a golden age - from the years before the first World War, or playing around Don Bradman in the 1930s and 1940s, or around Chappell in the 1970s, or around Shane Warne and the Waughs in the last decade.
The 12th man in that side played in no great teams. He came into Australian cricket during World Series Cricket. He survived the reunification in 1979 and was building his name as a batsman when Australian cricket disintegrated in 1984. The team were being smashed. Kim Hughes relinquished the captaincy in tears, then fled with a Test squad's worth of players to South Africa.
What did Allan Border do? He had been to the Caribbean, and played in Trinidad two of the greatest innings by any Australian anywhere: 98 not out and 100 not out, to earn the most miraculous draw. He'd proved himself as the one man who could stand up to them. So he took the captaincy, and in the next few years stood as the single pillar around which Australian cricket was rebuilt. He scored 11,174 Test runs, which no Australian has yet passed. He averaged over 50! He was the only one to make it into that Team of the Century who had spent most of his career surrounded by strugglers.
Also recently, I watched a TV documentary called Cricket in the Eighties. Usually any sporting footage more than 10 years old looks inferior. Tennis players dab and slice, footballers walk around the park leisurely, cricket's bowlers look round-arm, and the batsmen - even Bradman - have distinctly dodgy techniques. Everything is slower. If you transplanted any player from the past into the present, they simply couldn't take the speed.
Yet when I watched those West Indian batteries - Holding, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner, Courtney Walsh, Ambrose - I saw attacks that were faster, nastier, and harder than today's. Pitches were most certainly quicker and bouncier. If you threw a 2006 vintage Ricky Ponting, or Mohammad Yousuf, or Sachin Tendulkar into a 1984 Test match against those West Indians in, say, Brisbane or Barbados, it's the present stars who would suffer.

Border retired one year before Australia won back the Frank Worrell Trophy. He never held it. But that's the way life is. It's not a fairytale. And Allan Border was never the fairytale hero

So my appreciation of Allan Border has increased over time. As it should. I feel that Border's legacy will grow and grow over the years, as will Brian Lara's for similar reasons. Yet while Border developed, under duress, personal leadership skills, which Lara never did, he was never as glamorous as the man who took his world record.
Border stood in a baseballer's crouch, bat raised, ready to hop backwards and pull or cut the short ball. The Trinidad innings of 1984 were full of twitching jabs at balls aimed into his armpits. As he aged he became a plainly unattractive batsman to watch, all punch, no grace.
But this is to forget what a wonderful attacker he was. He was arguably the best player of spin Australia has produced in 50 years. He scored 150 in each innings in a Test in Lahore against Iqbal Qasim and Tauseef Ahmed. It would have been a dream to see him play Shane Warne.
Though his reputation is built on stodge and defiance, Border was also the finest all-round one-day cricketer of his time, alongside Viv Richards. I was at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1985 when Border smashed an attack of Holding, Garner, Marshall, Winston Davis and Richards for 127 not out off 140 balls.
He was also a brilliant fielder. In his early years he was a wonderful catcher in the hardest position, the wide third-to-fifth slips.
His left-arm spinners were always useful, and in typical Border fashion, he underused himself. In 1988-89 he took 11 wickets in a Test match against West Indies.
Yet the enduring image of Border is from off the field, from the decisive Adelaide Test of the 1992-93 series. Sitting in the dressing room he clutched a lucky cricket ball in his hands. Finally we were going to beat them. Finally Border was going to beat them. Two runs short, Walsh got Craig McDermott with a lifter. The keeper caught the ball, but the cameras caught Border. He sprang to his feet and hurled his ball into the floor. An entire career's worth of frustration captured in a single gesture.
Border retired one year before Australia won back the Frank Worrell Trophy. He never held it. But that's the way life is. It's not a fairytale. And Allan Border was never the fairytale hero. If I'm appreciating him more now, I'm glad. It shows some wisdom is finally getting through.

Bangladesh beat Australia
With a shot for six over midwicket, the most improbable scoreline in cricket comes to pass
Andrew Miller
October 11, 2009

http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine...ry/428624.html
Matches: Australia v Bangladesh at Cardiff
Teams: Bangladesh
Other links: 50 Magic Moments
Cardiff, 18 June 2005
"It's only Bangladesh," thought Andrew Symonds, as he embarked on an ill-advised bender through the streets of Cardiff that ended at 8am on the morning of Australia's first match of the 2005 NatWest Series. Symonds was instantly dropped, but his indiscretion was the first sign of the tremors to come.

Seeking a big statement to launch their Ashes summer, Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting instead managed just one run between them, and thereafter the innings stuttered. Damien Martyn and Michael Clarke steadied the ship, and Michael Hussey and Simon Katich added late momentum, but a target of 250 was by no means out of reach.

Certainly not with Mohammad Ashraful on hand to play the innings of his life. Short of stature but big in ticker, he lambasted an Australian attack that was already showing the first signs of the rust that England would capitalise on later in the summer. His brilliantly paced 100, from 101 balls, kept Bangladesh on course throughout, as word spread across the globe that something truly remarkable was afoot.

The coup de grace, however, was delivered by Aftab Ahmed. With seven needed for victory, it had all come down to the final over, delivered by Jason Gillespie. One blow put the contest beyond doubt - a mighty smear sailed clean over midwicket for six, to cue the most crazy scenes of jubilation ever witnessed at Sophia Gardens. Bangladesh had earned the respect of the cricketing world, and Australia's aura of invincibility was shattered.

The 187-year waitNearly two centuries worth of emptiness was reversed in a weekend for Newfoundland and Labrador. World Cup in another four years?

Liam Herringshaw
June 26, 2011

As I may have mentioned before, cricket has a long history in Newfoundland. The Encyclopaedia of Newfoundland states that St John's Cricket Club was in existence in 1824. What it does not have, however, is a long history of success. The provincial cricket records are far from complete, but they indicate that, in all that time, a Newfoundland team has never beaten another Canadian province.
As a Leicestershire supporter, I'm used to long periods of regional mediocrity, but 187 years without a win is pretty exceptional. So could Cricket NL reverse history in the 2011 Atlantic Twenty20 Cup, held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and claim an inaugural victory?
Last year's debut in the competition had been great fun, and though we'd gone home with three defeats out of three, a hat-trick and a Man-of-the-Match award were encouraging signs. And encouragingly for Canadian cricket, the tournament had expanded again. The addition of a strong Quebec team meant that this year's cup would feature an impressive five provinces, completed by the hosts Nova Scotia, last year's runners-up New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island.
Still lacking a pitch suitable for hard-ball cricket, but with a newly appointed player-coach, Kathir Chenthilnathan, the Newfoundland team set out for Halifax early to enable some pre-match practice on the tournament wicket. And, as opposed to last year, an entire squad of players came over from the Rock.
The first day of competition on Friday featured two games for Team NL, starting with the hosts. Last year we had been steamrolled by Nova Scotia for 38, and lost by eight wickets, but the 2011 version of Team NL was made of sterner stuff.
In damp conditions, some exceptional bowling from spin maestro Ashwin Gupta (3 for 22) helped keep Nova Scotia to 155 for 4. Then a couple of good knocks from captain Rakesh Negi (23) and Kathir (22 not out) ensured there was still a contest after a dozen overs.
Nova Scotia bowled tightly to restrict NL to 94 for 6 in the end, but a 61-run defeat was much more respectable than last year, and Ashwin's display with the ball got him the Man-of-the-Match award. One game in and already the provincial trophy cabinet had doubled its wares!

In my first over in Test cricket, to Colin Cowdrey at The Oval in August 1968, I appealed for lbw decisions for the first four balls. The fifth ball was the decider. Cowdrey went well back and the ball cannoned into his pads halfway up middle stump. Umpire Charlie Elliott raised his index finger, and "Kipper" touched the peak of his England cap and said to me, "Well bowled, master."
In hindsight Cowdrey was a pretty good wicket, given that he had conquered the spin of Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine at a time when I was trying to track down an ice-cold Paddle Pop in Perth.
Test cricket is the ultimate challenge for the spin bowler. Sadly Twenty20s and ODIs bring mug spinners to the fore. They skip through their overs and bowl "dot" balls, which their legion of hangers-on believe to be something akin to heaven. Test spinners are all about getting people out. After all, the best way to cut the run rate is to take wickets.
Before getting into big cricket I felt the need to have a coaching session with Clarrie Grimmett. I was 21, living in Perth, and Clarrie, a sprightly 76, was based in Adelaide. To my mind a spinner cannot be doing things all that brilliantly if he thinks he is a pretty good bowler but doesn't get many wickets. That was my lot, and I sought Clarrie's advice. Two days in the train from Perth to Adelaide, then a short bus ride to the suburb of Firle, found Clarrie at home. He was up the top of an ancient pepper tree.
There he had hung a ball in a stocking. He handed me a Jack Hobbs-autographed bat, and having dismissed my protestations that I wanted to learn spin bowling, not batting, he said with a broad grin: "Well, son, there was a youngster I taught to play the square cut on the voyage to England in 1930 and… Don Bradman was a fast learner."
Clarrie swung one ball towards me and I met it in the middle of his bat. We then went to the nets. Clarrie had a full-sized turf wicket in his backyard. He wandered to the batting end. He wore no protective equipment - no box, no pads or gloves. Just his Jack Hobbs bat. "Bowl up, son," he cried. My first ball met the middle of his bat. He called me down the track. "Son," he said, "Give up bowling and become a batsman… I could play you blindfolded."
As it happened I had a handkerchief in my pocket. He put that over his horn-rimmed glasses and my second ball met the middle of his bat. When he had stopped laughing he proceeded to give me the best possible lesson on spin bowling. He talked about spinning on a trajectory just above the eye line of the batsman.
Eighteen months later I was playing a Test match in India. The Nawab of Pataudi was facing, and while he was not smashing my bowling all over the park, he was clearly in control. I had to find a way to arrest the situation, so I thought of Grimmett and the necessity of getting the ball to dip acutely from just above the eye line.
It worked. The dipping flight fooled him to the extent that he wasn't sure exactly where the ball would bounce. Pataudi pushed forward in hope rather than conviction, and within four balls Ian Chappell had grabbed another bat-pad chance at forward short leg.
A spinner needs a plan to get wickets at the top level. Even a bad plan is better than no plan at all, but it is not about reinventing the wheel. Grimmett had many a plan. He told me that he often saw the image of a batsman he was about to dismiss in his mind's eye. When the wicket fell, he was nonchalant, for this was the action replay. Nowadays visualisation is an official part of cricket coaching.
The key to spin bowling is how the ball arrives. If the ball is spun hard and the bowler gets lots of energy up and over his braced front leg, he will achieve a dipping flight path that starts just above the eye line and drops quickly.
Grimmett firmly believed, as does Shane Warne, that a batsman had to be deceived in the air. Warne's strategy at the start of a spell was to bowl his fiercely spun stock legbreak with subtle changes of pace. Similarly my idea was to stay in the attack. There is nothing worse for a bowler than to go for 10 or 12 runs in his first over. Psychologically you are then playing catch-up to make your figures look reasonable.

If a spinner doesn't plan he doesn't change his pace and thus does not break the rhythm of the batsman. It is crucial to a Test spin bowler's success that he attacks with subtle changes of pace

As an offspinner I found if my off-side field was in order the rest fell into place. My basic plan against a right-hander was to have the ball arriving in a dangerous manner: spin hard and drive up and over the braced front leg. And I wanted to lure the batsman into trying to hit to the off side, against the spin, to look at the huge gap between point and my very straight short cover. When a batsman hit against the spin and was done in flight, the spin would take the ball to the on side - a potential catch to bat-pad or short midwicket. Sometimes this plan doesn't work - the batsman might be clean-bowled, or if the ball skipped on straight, caught at slip, or it would cannon into his front pad for no result.
If a spinner doesn't plan he doesn't change his pace and thus does not break the rhythm of the batsman. It is crucial to a Test spin bowler's success that he attacks with subtle changes of pace.
I had played 10 Test matches and taken 46 wickets when Bob Simpson, the former Australia opening batsman and Test captain, sidled up to me and said: "You need a straight one."
I eyeballed Bob and said that some of my offbreaks went dead straight and "they don't pick them". He went on to say that I needed a ball that, to all intent and purpose, looked as if it would turn from the off but would skip off straight. I could "bowl" what they call a doosra today, but when I played, offspinners did not have ICC carte blanche to throw the ball. I felt it was wrong to throw, so I discarded the whole thing.
In Tests a batsman is challenged by pace and spin. My aim was to take 100 Test wickets in 20 Tests. But I got there in my 23rd - the same as Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Garth McKenzie - after which circumstances changed. Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson joined forces, and man, you tried to grab a wicket anyhow while those two were on the hunt. My next 15 Tests brought little in way of wickets, but my experience helped me in a coaching sense. I knew how unloved and untried spinners felt.
Somehow the cricket world brought forth a bunch of national coaches who didn't know the difference between an offbreak and a toothpick. Some were celebrated ones, like South Africa's Bob Woolmer. His idea of combating spin was ludicrous. He had blokes trying to hit sixes against Shane Warne's legspin. As splendid as he was against any opposition, no wonder Warne excelled against Woolmer-coached sides.
It is amazing that all national sides pick ex-fast bowlers as their bowling coaches. At least in England, Andy Flower, easily the best coach in world cricket, recognises the role of the spin coach. Mushtaq Ahmed, the former Pakistan legspinner, teams with David Saker, the fast-bowling coach, to help the England bowlers.
For years Australia have floundered in the spin department. Troy Cooley, the bowling coach, is a fast-bowling man, not one for spin. Australia has suffered; a lot of the blame can be attributed to the stupid stuff going on at the so-called Centre of Excellence in Brisbane.
Australia have had three great spinners: Grimmett, Bill O'Reilly and Warne. If Grimmett had played 145 Tests, the same as Warne, he would have taken 870 wickets. Different eras, of course, but you get the idea of how good Grimmett was. However, the best offie I ever saw - by a mile - was the little Indian Erapalli Prasanna. Now there was a bowler.

^^ I really enjoyed the article by Ashley Mallett as well, though his implicit barb at Murali was a bit uncalled for. This was an article that I read today by a current Tasmanian batsman, Ed Cowan:

Is cricket the black dog of the sporting kennel?Are cricketers more pre-disposed to depression than the average man in the street?
Ed Cowan
July 28, 2011

It is estimated that one in six males will suffer from depression at some stage in his life. In line with this statistic, leading experts suggest that up to 15% of elite athletes are depression-sufferers. That implies it will on average affect about two men in every cricket change room. Perhaps the surprise is not how many players seem to be divulging recent mental troubles but how few.

A professional sportsperson is his or her performances. From experience I can say it can feel like you have ceased to exist when failure is the story of your day. Statistically, however, despite the perception that the pressures of professional sport may have a tendency to promote mental illness, they in fact are no different than those faced by the wider public - the pressures may differ but the outcome, it seems, is much the same.

Cricket, however, has long been touted as an outlier to these statistics. Sadly there has been little or no research into depression within specific sports, and so all cricket can hang its hunch on is the word of the sufferers who have been brave enough to come forward publicly, and the gut feel of the rest of the community.

Every cricketer knows anxiety, just as every cricketer knows relief and satisfaction. That full spectrum of emotion is actually, according to top sports psychologists, "good for cognitive development" of athletes, making them flexible in their ability to deal with a wide variety of situations. This was recognised long ago at Wimbledon, where the centre-court players' dressing room is graced with a line from Rudyard Kipling's "If": "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same".

However, to suggest, as some have recently, that all cricketers at some time will suffer from some kind of depression or mild anxiety disorder, is simply flippant. Depression is ongoing, self-normalising, and debilitating to the point of driving people to action beyond what they would otherwise ever consider - whether it be an angry outburst or, at worst, self-harm.

David Frith in his book Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides contends that cricket is by far the greatest sport for suicides. Although some of his case studies bring forth tenuous links between cricket and the sad ends to several lives, his central thesis certainly has some validity: that the game promotes the thought patterns and anxiety levels required to tumble people into the desperate hole of depression. In an illustration arguably more significant than that offered by Frith's cricket sample, Major League Baseball players - perhaps the only brothers to international cricketers - have been shown to be two and a half times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the American male population.

Few who know the game could argue against the notion that cricket contains triggers for depression. Despite being a team sport, it is perhaps the only game where one's contribution is entirely objective. There is no escaping the black and white of failure - among other things, it is statistically tangible. Nothing engulfs you like the self-doubt and frustration of sitting in the corner of the change room, cursing your own inability, wondering what you could have done to avoid the finality of dismissal. Your team may win, but more often than not, you are not even going to be partly responsible if they do. Your contribution, not only self-analysed, has the perceived added weight of 10 other sets of critical eyes. You can feel as though you have not let not just yourself down, but worse, those around you. While this may occur in other team sports, it rarely does with the frequency it does in cricket.

The time scales inherent in the game - the lag between a failure and the opportunity to make amends - can mean this cloud of doubt has the opportunity to precipitate into a sea of introspection. In a game that is often a one-chance saloon (and a chance that is sensitive to the adjudication of others) the margin for error is slim, and emotions on polar opposites of the spectrum are only ever a feather edge away.

On a professional level, no sport takes you away from home for extended periods without your support network like cricket does. In the next three years Australian cricketers will spend on average 44 weeks a year away from their own beds - only two of which are allocated to be fully funded family time. Families are welcome on tour at any stage, but the logistics for them to actually go are largely unworkable. Children still need to go to school, wives still need to lead their own lives. A travelling, brooding cricketer can be left to his own devices for extended periods - more often than not in this age of security, solely in the confines of a hotel room - which feeds the anxiety monster.

These absences can also create a multitude of strains in relationships with loved ones, which, though certainly not exclusive to the game, also need to be considered when looking at the relation between cricket and depression. Ryan Campbell, a former sufferer when he played the game professionally, recognised his recovery started when a medical expert provided clarity about segregating the three facets of his life: work, family and the social aspect. No game blurs these boundaries like cricket, in which the team, particularly on the road, are your work colleagues, your friends and your family.

Sadly, despite growing awareness about mental health issues outside of the change room, it is still something of a taboo topic within. While cricketers know there is a fantastic support network available through the players' associations, these issues are rarely, in my experience, openly discussed among the players themselves.

Cricket team dynamics can be changeable at best. Most players are pursuing higher personal honours, while trying to maintain a supportive team environment. In close and often successful teams, those comfortable within the hierarchy will often be counsellors to the more fragile members. Nonetheless, some team environments are so competitive that to show fear, insecurity or weakness leaves you on the periphery of both the group and also your own delicate mental sanity. For all the increasing popularity of sports psychologists, and their role in "management" of mental states, their focus is usually on training the mind to win, not to be happy - not the same thing when it comes to cricket.

Although the game itself may be to blame, one of the least discussed issues surrounding depression in cricket is cricket's seeming tendency to attract a type of individual pre-disposed to mental illness. Iain O'Brien alluded to this when he bravely went public about his depression. "Go back to the very start," he said, "and you have to ask the question, is it cricket that acts as a catalyst for mental illnesses or is it the people who are drawn to it?" While such a question will always be contentious, it is worth opening up the forum for discussion.

The game, buried in statistics, may attract the analytically inclined - the sort of person who wants to obsess about technique and dwell on statistical comparisons to justify his worth to the team. Perhaps it attracts a certain kind of high achiever. Cricket has traditionally been a middle- and upper-class pursuit in many parts of the world - attracting people who in other walks of life know and chase perfection, a trait common among depression sufferers. Some of these people are left empty-handed when it comes to cricket; "perfect" and cricket certainly don't co-exist particularly happily in my experience.

The game, well known for its rituals and superstitions around preparation and success, has always - to adopt "bush" diagnosis - attracted people with strains of obsessive compulsive disorder. What is fact is the link between OCD and depression - two-thirds of those who have the former also suffer from the latter.

Cricket will continue to have players who struggle with mental illness. We can only hope that an increase in awareness and mental health literacy will enable the game to be at the forefront of their rehabilitation. We can also hope that future research will finally provide us with a few definitive answers.

As the writer mentions, sports psychologists often try to inculcate a winning mentality without teaching players how to be happy. As fans looking in from outside, we often disregard the sentiments of players because we think: "what problems could they have? They're very well paid and they get to play a sport for a living!" I definitely think a greater analysis needs to be done into the way players think about the game. Maybe it will even help us understand the great enigma that is Mohammad Ashraful?

I think to add to the cricket-specific issues mentioned above, the players must also suffer the kind of anxieties any sportsperson would have such as ensuring a comfortable standard of living for their families for their entire lives in the short period that they get to play professionally. After all, many professional athletes, especially in a time consuming sport like cricket, have difficulty in breaking into the national squad AND studying or preparing for another career. I believe Chris Gayle raised this issue recently. Many players don't have lucrative endorsements and such pressures may be what draw players from poorer backgrounds like Mohammad Amir towards spot-fixing, etc.

In the crash-bang world of one-day and Twenty20 cricket, dot balls are regarded as something of an achievement, and maiden overs an endangered species (if not an extinct one as far as Twenty20 is concerned). It is therefore almost certain that Brian Langford's return of 8-8-0-0 in the inaugural season of the Players' Sunday League in 1969 will never be equalled.
For almost a decade after one-day cricket was introduced in 1963, sides approached it in much the same way as they did the first-class game. Bowlers were played on their merits, unorthodoxy was rare, and aside from risky running in the dying overs, there was little to distinguish the various forms of the game, especially as coloured clothing was still years away.
Buoyed by the success of the Gillette Cup in bringing crowd and much-needed cash to counties, in 1969 the Test & County Cricket Board, the forerunner of the ECB, launched a 40-over Sunday competition. It proved an immediate hit with the public, even if it was less popular with players as matches were sandwiched between the first and second days of Championship games (the Saturday and the Monday), often requiring long journeys to fulfill fixtures that appeared to have been arranged by someone with no idea of travelling on Britain's roads on busy summer weekends.
Fortunately there was no such logistical headache for Somerset and Essex when they met in Yeovil on July 27 as the game coincided with their Championship clash in Taunton. So both sides only had a short trip across the county on a warm Sunday for the 2pm start. Essex were the favourites, lying second to Lancashire with only one loss in their 10 matches, while Somerset with two victories to their name, were second from bottom.
Langford, Somerset's captain, won the toss, and stuck Essex in to bat, and his bowlers took early wickets to reduce the visitors to 19 for 3 from 13 overs. On a pitch that turned from the start, Langford brought himself on after the second wicket fell. Brian Ward, the Essex opener, and Lee Irvine, their South African overseas player, reckoned he was the danger man, and decided on a safety-first approach for his eight-over spell. "I thought I'd play him out," Ward recalled. "Talk about records like Laker's... that'll never be beaten."
Langford duly wheeled away with little attempt made to score off him. Irvine fell to Peter Robinson at the other end, bringing in the hard-hitting West Indian allrounder Keith Boyce to the crease. But Boyce was unable to get the strike as Ward defended over after over. "I only bowled about three balls to Boyce otherwise I certainly wouldn't have finished with eight maidens," Langford admitted.
There were two moments that threatened to spoil his perfect figures. The first when a ball appeared to be gloved down to long leg, but umpire John Langridge signalled a leg bye, the second when Boyce pulled a ball straight into Robinson at short leg.
"At the start of the eighth over Langridge pointed out that I could finish with unusual figures, and I had to ask what he meant," Langford said. "It hadn't registered that I'd sent down seven maidens because I was captain, and had more important things to think about."
The eighth over to Ward was another maiden, and Langford retired from the attack with his small place in cricket history guaranteed. He had one last contribution to the innings when he ran out Doug Insole for 0 with a direct hit from deep square leg. The 43-year-old Insole, who had not played for his county for six years, had rushed down by train that morning after answering an SOS from the county, and had suffered the ignominy of having a child throw up over his cricket bag en route. It was a wasted trip, and was his last appearance in serious cricket, providing a statistically symmetrical finale as he had been run out by a direct hit in his first innings 22 years earlier.
Essex were eventually bowled out for 126 in 38.2 overs, and while that would be a poor Twenty20 score today, in those times it was low but not extraordinarily so. On the same day in the seven other Players' League matches only three teams passed 200 and the rest failed to reach 150.
Even so, Somerset struggled, and at 82 for 8 appeared set for defeat before Robinson (24*) and Graham Burgess (26*) saw them home with a leg bye off the first ball of the last over. Their ninth-wicket stand of 45 took 15 overs.
The following weekend Langford was brought back down to earth when his eight overs went for 33 against Middlesex, but he resumed his niggardly ways with 8-1-17-1 against Yorkshire, 8-1-24-3 against Derbyshire, and 8-2-16-1 against Sussex in the final stages of the summer.

What happened next?

Essex slipped to finish third in the bale behind winners Lancashire and Hampshire, while Somerset remained second from bottom.

Langford captained Somerset in 1970 and 1971, steering them to fifth in the Sunday League and seventh in the Championship in his final season. He retired at the end of 1974 after 22 seasons with the county.

Is there an incident from the past you would like to know more about? Email us with your comments and suggestions.

The strange silence of Gavaskar and ShastriWhy have these two stalwarts of Indian cricket never spoken out about the damage the IPL has done to the country's Test team?Ramachandra GuhaAugust 14, 2011

With the loss of three successive Test matches to England, in England, Indian cricket fans are consumed by despair. However, my own despair had set in even before the first Test began, when, in an election held to select a new president of the Mumbai Cricket Association, Dilip Vengsarkar was defeated by a politician named Vilasrao Deshmukh.

My dejection was deepened by the fact that Vengsarkar was no ordinary cricketer. In his playing days he was a batsman of high class, with an outstanding record against West Indies, and against England (he remains the only overseas batsman to have scored three Test hundreds at Lord's). He was also a fine one-day player, and a member of the teams who won the World Cup in 1983 and the World Championship of Cricket two years later.

After his retirement Vengsarkar has focused on training young cricketers. Among his early wards was a certain Yuvraj Singh, Man of the Tournament in the last World Cup. Unlike some other cricketers Vengsarkar does more than lend his name to a cricket academy; he supervises the players' progress, pays (if required) their school and medical fees out of his own pocket, and travels with them across India. And he refuses to take any payment himself. The veteran Mumbai cricket writer Makarand Waingankar says that in his own (several decades-long) experience he has not seen a former Test cricketer so devoted to nurturing young talent.

On the other side, Deshmukh is a rather ordinary politician. Unlike some others (for example Arun Jaitley or the late Madhavrao Scindia) he does not have a previous interest in the game of cricket. His record in his chosen field, public service, has been undistinguished, and on occasion (as in the aftermath of 26/11) disastrous. Deshmukh's desire to become president of the MCA did not stem from a love of the game or a commitment to clean administration. His motivation appears to have been the restoration of his social status, which had been damaged during the Mumbai terror attacks and the subsequent loss of his chief ministership.

When, some months ago, I first heard of this contest, I wondered if the two most famous former cricketers from the city, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri, would support their old team-mate. They had played alongside Vengsarkar for many years, for both Mumbai and India. But then, I thought, perhaps it was not necessary for them to make a statement to this effect. That the sportsmen of Mumbai, the sporting clubs of Mumbai -- of Mumbai, which in many ways is the capital city of Indian cricket - would elect Deshmukh over Vengsarkar seemed scarcely believable. But they did, out of what motives and intentions one could only speculate. When I first heard of the result, I was appalled. Surely many MCA members would have voted the other way if Gavaskar and Shastri had publicly endorsed Vengsarkar?

One believes that, in general, former cricketers would run cricket associations more ably than serving politicians. Given Vengsarkar's commitment to young cricketers, and Deshmukh's own spectacular indifference to the public good, this general principle should have been emphatically validated here. Yet two celebrated cricketers from Mumbai, two cricketers produced by Mumbai, two cricketers who were close contemporaries and colleagues of the cricketer in the fray, chose not to help him. Why? What would it have cost Gavaskar and Shastri to ask the clubs of Mumbai to cast their votes in favour of the man who was far and away the better candidate?

Their silence during the elections of their parent association confirmed, for me, the pusillanimity of the two. The recent revelations that they are paid propagandists of the Board of Control for Cricket in India have confirmed, for many other fans, the lack of principle in Gavaskar and Shastri. They feel betrayed by the disclosure that commentators they trusted to give a fair and credible account of the game were under contract to speak in His Master's Voice alone.

One would expect Gavaskar and Shastri to make the connection between the board's obsession with the IPL and the poor performance of the Indian team in England. That they have stayed silent suggests that their commitment to cricket is not as dispassionate as it perhaps should be

My impression, based on press reports and conversations with friends, is that the fans felt more let down by Gavaskar than by Shastri. This is for two reasons. First, while Shastri was a decent allrounder, Gavaskar was one of the greats of the game. Second, while Shastri was never known for selflessness, Gavaskar had in the past fought bravely for the rights of his fellow cricketers. Gavaskar played an important role in organising a players' association that succeeded in raising match fees manifold and in securing pensions for retired cricketers. Gavaskar led a movement in his native Mumbai to have flats allotted to former Test players who lived in the city.

Gavaskar had, in the past, showed pluck in a political sense too. After Pakistan won the World Cup in 1992, he was invited to Karachi to speak. Bal Thackeray, the leader of the right-wing, regionalist Shiv Sena party, demanded that he not sup with the enemy, but Gavaskar defied him, saying that he was going as a cricketer and an Asian. Again, during the Mumbai riots of 1992-93, when Gavaskar saw, from a window of his apartment, a mob setting upon a Muslim, he rushed down to the street to stop them.

Gavaskar has answered the charge that he is a spokesman for the board by claiming that his newspaper columns have sometimes been critical of its policies. However, in hundreds of hours of hearing Shastri and Gavaskar speak on television, I cannot recall them ever being critical in any way of the BCCI. Crucially, in both print and on air I have never heard either commentator ever do anything but praise the Indian Premier League in lavish terms. Neither has commented on the shady financial underpinnings of the league, neither has dared point out that the ownership of the Chennai Super Kings by the board's secretary is legally and morally indefensible.

My view, and not mine alone, is that the existence of the IPL is the main reason India is no longer the No. 1 team in Test cricket. The case can be made on cricketing grounds, without any reference to the business methods of Lalit Modi or N Srinivasan. If India have performed poorly in the ongoing Test series against England, the excessive burdens placed on the players by the IPL are surely a key factor. That Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, and Zaheer Khan had to play that tournament immediately after the World Cup is why they had to miss the West Indies tour and did not recover their full fitness for the England tour. The under-performance of other major players, such as MS Dhoni, is likewise linked to the fact they have been playing too much cricket.

One would expect Gavaskar and Shastri, as active, influential, full-time commentators on the game, to make these connections between the board's obsession with the IPL and the poor performance of the Indian team in England. That they have stayed silent suggests that their commitment to cricket is not as dispassionate as it perhaps should be.

The cynic would say that these criticisms are beside the point, that Gavaskar and Shastri are merely doing a job. But in this fan, the sense of disappointment remains. Having watched Gavaskar and Shastri win and save Test matches for India, I ask: why must they be so blind to the ways in which the IPL is bad for Test cricket in India? Having watched them, time and again, help Mumbai defeat my own state, Karnataka, I wonder: why could they not support their former team-mate in the MCA elections against a cricket-illiterate politician?

Historian and cricket writer Ramachandra Guha is the author of A Corner of a Foreign Field and Wickets in the East among other books. This article was first published in the Kolkata Telegraph

From time to time, we see cricket players hauled in front of courts because of their personal indiscretions or corruption, but have you ever wondered about the possibility of taking a Cricket Board or the International Cricket Council itself to court for blatant incompetence/corruption/down right criminal behaviour?

Well, here is an article on just such an issue with a particular focus on Maurice Odumbe's attempts to take the Kenya Cricket Association and the ICC to court after he was convicted for 'inappropriate conduct with bookmakers'. It's a bit on the dry side as it is an academic article, but I think anyone willing to invest the time to read it would find it quite interesting.

M. Akech, "The Maurice Odumbe Investigation and Judicial Review of the Power of International Sports Organizations" [2008] 6 ESLJ 2

Abstract: "This article examines whether, and the circumstances in which, national courts should review the power of International Sports Organizations (ISOs). It uses the case of Maurice Odumbe as an illustration, and argues that national courts should regulate the power of bodies such as the International Cricket Council (ICC) where such power has been exercised unreasonably, where the rules and regulations of ISOs are themselves unreasonable, and also where ISOs interpret their rules and regulations unreasonably or wrongly."